Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
Licensed psychotherapist · 10+ years · EMDR · Lifespan Integration · Certified HeartMath trainer · English, German, Hebrew · Online, worldwide
The method
Physiology first, so the deeper work has something steady to land on.
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Most therapy is organised around understanding. You examine your history, notice patterns, connect present reactions to past experience. This is genuinely valuable, and for many people it's sufficient.
For some people it isn't. They arrive with excellent self-knowledge and no corresponding change. They can predict their own reactions accurately and still not prevent them.
That's not a failure of the therapy or of the person. It reflects something about how the two systems are arranged.
Understanding is slow, verbal and deliberate. The reactions that cause trouble — the flare of defensiveness, the shutdown, the disproportionate response to a mild criticism — are fast, physiological and automatic. They were established before language, or under conditions where speed mattered more than accuracy. Explaining them to yourself afterwards does not reach the system that produced them.
At the other extreme sits the regulation world — breathwork, cold exposure, HRV apps, meditation. These do reach the physiological layer, and they help. But used alone they become management: a set of techniques for containing something that keeps being generated. The trigger stays intact.
Most therapy begins and ends at understanding. Most regulation work stops at technique. This approach sequences them.
This is worth being specific about, because it's the part most easily mistaken for eclecticism.
A 2020 systematic review in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback pooled 58 randomised controlled trials of HRV biofeedback. It found a small-to-moderate effect overall — comparable to other treatments considered effective — with the strongest results for anxiety, depression and anger, and the weakest for PTSD.
That is exactly what you'd expect from something that builds regulatory capacity without processing what generates the activation. Meanwhile the methods with the strongest trauma evidence — EMDR foremost — work on precisely that material, and work far better in someone who can stay present while they do it.
What the evidence says
Using either alone leaves a predictable gap. The order isn't a style choice — it follows from what each is demonstrably good at.
What we do: establish where your nervous system actually sits, then build the ability to move it.
We start with a baseline using HeartMath coherence training — a form of heart-rate-variability biofeedback that shows, on screen and in real time, the physiological state you're in. From there you learn to recognise the difference between activation, shutdown and settled engagement, in yourself, as it happens rather than afterwards.
Then you practise shifting — first in the room, then in the situations that actually matter. Before a difficult meeting. During a conversation that's going badly. Afterwards, when you'd usually spend three hours re-running it.
Why it comes first: processing difficult material requires a system stable enough to stay present. Without that, you either flood or numb, and neither produces change. Regulation is also the fastest visible gain — most people notice something within a few weeks, which matters when you've been discouraged by previous therapy.
What we do: process the experiences still generating the reaction, so they stop firing in the present.
Once there's enough stability, we work directly with the material underneath — the memories, relational injuries and early conditions that continue to signal threat. This is where the gap between what you understand and what your body does begins to close.
EMDR is an extensively researched approach to processing traumatic and distressing memories, recognised by the World Health Organization, NICE in the UK, and the American Psychological Association among others. It doesn't require describing distressing events in detail, and it often works in fewer sessions than talking approaches. It works well online.
Lifespan Integration is a gentler, less widely known method that works with the timeline of your life rather than with single memories. It's particularly suited to attachment injuries, early or preverbal experience, and the diffuse sense that something has always been this way rather than one identifiable event. Its research base is smaller than EMDR's — supported more by clinical practice than by large trials — and I'll be straightforward with you about that. In the right situations, in my experience, it does things nothing else I've trained in achieves.
What we do: make sense of what the pattern was protecting, and turn change into something durable.
Regulation and processing can shift a great deal. But if nothing changes in how you understand yourself, the old organisation tends to reassert itself — often in a new form.
So the final stage is psychodynamic: what the pattern was for, what it protected you from, what it cost, and what takes its place. Alongside that we work on values and strengths — what you actually want your life organised around, now that it isn't organised around managing threat.
This is also where we test the change against reality. Not in the calm of a session, but in the conversations, decisions and pressures where the old response used to be automatic.
Not one technique applied everywhere, but three different jobs.
Prep
Settling deliberately ahead of something you know will be demanding, rather than bracing for it.
Shift and reset
Changing state in under a minute, in the middle of the situation, without anyone noticing.
Sustain
Holding a steadier baseline through a difficult period, so you're not recovering from every day in turn.
Most people arrive with none of these and leave using two or three routinely. More on HeartMath and nervous-system regulation →
The advantage isn't the number of methods I've trained in. It's being able to tell which one the problem in front of me actually needs.
The three stages describe a logic, not a fixed schedule. In practice they overlap, and we return to earlier stages when something needs it.
Because the work includes the body, it follows the body's timeline — just like physical training. You feel something early; the deeper change accumulates with the process.
The physiological work is a foundation, not the point. If regulation alone were sufficient, an app would do it.
It suits people willing to practise between sessions and to look at emotional and relational material, not only physiological data. If you want a technique rather than a process, I'm the wrong person — and I'd rather say so at the start.
Before psychotherapy I worked as a VLSI engineer and in product management. I'm used to layered systems where the visible symptom is rarely where the fault sits, and where fixing the wrong layer produces confident, useless work.
That's the habit I brought with me. The question I'm always asking is which layer is maintaining this — physiology, unprocessed experience, or the story you've organised yourself around. The answer determines what we do, and it isn't always the layer that seems most obvious.
What I draw on
EMDR processes specific distressing memories and has a large research base, particularly for PTSD. Lifespan Integration works with your life timeline as a whole rather than isolated events, and suits attachment injuries and early or preverbal experience — where there's no single memory to target. EMDR is more researched; Lifespan Integration is gentler and often better tolerated by people who find EMDR overwhelming.
No, but I'd encourage it. It's usually the fastest source of visible change, and it makes the later work more tolerable. Some people use it intensively; others just enough to recognise their own states more reliably.
It depends on what we're working with. Regulation typically shows measurable change within four to eight weeks. Processing work varies widely — from a handful of sessions for a single contained experience, to considerably longer for developmental or attachment material. I'll give you an honest estimate once I know what we're dealing with, and revise it if I'm wrong.
Yes. All three stages work by video, including EMDR and HeartMath training. The only element that requires being in Vienna is neurofeedback, which is equipment-dependent and optional.
Therapy. I'm a psychotherapist licensed by the Austrian Ministry of Health, working within a clinical framework. Some of what I use — values and strengths work, nervous-system training — also appears in coaching, but the underlying training, the depth of the work and the standards it's held to are different.
We work out what layer your difficulty is likely sitting in, and whether this is the right approach for it.
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